


Spots, in Five Movements

by Sophonisba



Series: Zophonisbeion [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Character of Color, Chicken Pox, Gen, Kid Fic, Pre-Canon, Smallpox, inoculation, rubella
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-03-08
Updated: 2011-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:30:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophonisba/pseuds/Sophonisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Formerly "Takes on Spots"; encounters the members of AR-1 had with five childhood diseases.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Aiden's visit to his mother (and his early immunization) is less than successful.

When Aiden Ford was seven, he went to his mother's for a visit.

Her apartment was white with hardwood floors, full of spindly-legged furniture and the occasional little rug or glass bowl or vase out by itself. There was nowhere, really, to run around and nowhere that felt like somewhere anyone could be comfortable. Even her bedroom was all white and cream, and she carefully tidied up Aiden's things and hid his suitcase in her closet.

All the white walls made his eyes hurt, and after the first day he didn't feel as much like running around, much to his mother's relief. He colored in his coloring books and played with his Transformers, and she only had to tell him three times to keep his voice down, they were inside.

She had a party one afternoon, mostly people from her work, and Aiden could always tell which ones she hadn't told about him; even the friendlier ones shot a second glance at his brown skin and her fair face. His mother blushed, sometimes, even as she lifted her chin, and Aiden was glad that it wasn't as obvious how flushed he was.

They were mostly milling around the dining table where she had laid out the food, and so he went over to the living-room area and lay down on the couch. He thought about putting the throw blanket on the back of the couch over himself, but he was so, so hot.

And then he was so cold, so very cold, and he pulled the blanket down over himself and his face, shivering and shivering.

"Not feeling up to chatting with the guests, kiddo?" the one guest his mother had invited over the day before asked. His mother had introduced her as "Cathy," but Aiden's grandparents had raised him too well to be comfortable calling a grown woman by her given name.

"Nngh," said Aiden, which had been meant to be "No, Miz Cathy" before it actually tried to get out his throat.

And then there was a delightfully warm and cool hand on his temple for a moment before it was jerked away. Aiden actually whimpered for a moment (which he would deny ever after, he wasn't a baby), but fortunately it was lost in the woman's yelp of "Jesus, Diane, the kid's burning up!"

And then his mother was there, helping him to his feet and to her own dim white bedroom and into the soft white bed, drawing the smooth white sheets and the heavy white feather duvet over him and lowering the blinds.

"I'll get a thermometer, I don't have one right now," his mother said. "And I'll get everyone out of here -- do you want me to sit with you, Aiden?"

"You don't have to," Aiden said muzzily. "You shouldn't have to give up your party."

"Oh, hon," his mother said. She rubbed little circles on his back. "Would you like some music, or would that make it worse? Some hot milk? What do you want?"

"I want to stop being hot and cold and hot and cold," Aiden mumbled around the headache that had moved in behind his right eye. "I want this headache to go away. I want Grandma."

His mother's hand went very still for a moment, and then she rubbed a few more circles. "I'll just... see about things and call the doctor, and then I'll be right here," she said, rising to her feet and pulling the door to behind her.

The rest of that day all blurred into itself, although there was the part where he had to stick a thermometer under his tongue ("Jim ran out and got it for me," his mother told him) and the bits where his mother was talking on the telephone on the nighttable and sounding more and more upset. She hadn't had to send her party home, really, he'd have understood... he'd almost have rather she'd gone back out and had fun with her party rather than have her fluttering in and out of the darkened bedroom while his brain played the kettledrums on his skull.

The next morning, after his mother made him hot milk (and it was skim milk, so it might as well have been water, honestly) she bundled him up in his sweater and his coat and the throw blanket and took him to see a strange doctor. Aiden felt much better than he had, but there were strange little bumps on his cheeks and the back of his hands. They weren't chicken pox, because he'd seen pictures of kids with chicken pox, and when Tyrone had come over to play after getting better from chicken pox he'd had a pock scab come out in his hair, which had been... interesting.

The waiting room of the doctor's office didn't have any toys to play with or fish to watch swim around. One of the science magazines on the tables had an article about dinosaurs, though, and Aiden read all about dinosaurs with feathers and how birds (!) were probably descended from them until he was called in to see the doctor, who turned out to be a friendly short lady. Aiden would still rather have seen Dr. Henderson, who made funny faces and always had Tootsie Pops.

This doctor's hands were cold, but at least not damp, and it wasn't that bad except for the part where she pressed on sore spots under his ears that he hadn't really noticed until suddenly she was squashing them.

She didn't have Tootsie Pops, either, although she offered Aiden mints. They came in a little metal box that said "The original _curiously strong_ peppermints ALTOIDS." Aiden took two from her hand, and the doctor called his mother in while the top of his head blew off.

"Well, it looks like Aiden's got a classic case of rubella," the doctor told his mother. "Give him plenty of fluids and -- "

"Rubella?" Diane Ford repeated. "He should have been vaccinated for that!"

"According to the fax from Dr. Henderson's office, he's had his MMRs," the doctor shrugged. "Rubella is one of the few diseases that you can get twice; now and then the immunization doesn't take for some reason. Aiden, you're going to want to get lots of bed rest, drink lots of fluids, and take Tylenol three times a day."

"Shouldn't he have antibiotics?" Diane demanded.

The doctor rolled her eyes. "If you want to desensitize bacteria to them and eventually kill off millions with a simple infection we could have nuked ten years ago, sure. Seriously. Children's Tylenol. Call me if three times a day doesn't do enough for his headache."

So then Aiden was bundled back up and taken back to his mother's apartment, where she made him up a bed with her spare sheets and an extra blanket on the couch, and he watched television in between nodding off and determining that, while skim milk was sort of tolerable mixed in with hot sweet tea, if adults willingly ate garlic-ginger mint-marjoram coconut curry vegetable soup, he was never, ever, growing up.

And then, when he blinked himself awake again in the late afternoon, a blessedly familiar voice said "Hey."

"Hey, Grandma," Aiden said. She was still wearing her knit orange-gold sweater-cape, and the straw hat with the orange-gold shiny scarf of a hatband was on the coffee table. "How'd you get here?"

"Your mother called me, and I came," his grandma said matter-of-factly. "How're you feeling, pumpkin?"

Aiden groaned expressively.

"I can see that," his grandma said. "Do you think maybe you'd be up to some of my turkey noodle soup?"

"Yes, please," Aiden told her. He conscientiously amplified, for the sake of his mother twisting her hands nervously in the chair on the right, "Grandma makes the best turkey noodle soup."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it is imperative that Meredith not get chicken pox.

The year Meredith McKay was eleven, his parents planned a week-long family trip to Montréal. They would stay with an acquaintance at McGill that Meredith's father hadn't managed to enrage yet. During the days, Meredith and Jeanie would be shown the many interesting historical and cultural sites of Montréal, and in the evenings, the elder McKays would be able to go out and enjoy themselves while the acquaintance's teenage daughter looked after their two.

Then Jeanie started feeling ill. Their mother came in to take her temperature and noticed the spot on Jeanie's chest. And the other one on her arm.

"Chicken pox!" their father snorted when he heard. "Really, of all the..."

"She should finish with it just in time for Montréal," his wife assured him.

Meredith was already screaming at his sister from the safety of a closed door and three meters of hallway.

"Jean Dymphna McKay, you unmitigated idiot! I haven't had chicken pox yet!"

"I didn't get it on purpose!" Jeanie wailed.

"We won't be able to go to Montréal, and Dad will be snarly all summer, and... "

"Then you'll just have to not get chicken pox," their mother announced, attaining the head of the stairs. "You'd better sleep in the guest room for the duration; get everything you need out of your room, so you won't need to go upstairs while she's contagious."

Meredith made a face -- he didn't like the idea of sleeping on the ground floor; the guest bedroom's windows faced the street -- but the idea of quarantine made too much sense to argue, and so he didn't.

So the pattern was set: Meredith would wake up, dress himself, eat his breakfast (a cooperative effort between himself and his mother), arrange what he was going to do that afternoon and receive funds if necessary, catch the bus to school, and after school either come home on the bus or take public transportation to the library or, on two occasions, museums. Surprisingly, it was only the geology museum that balked at allowing an eleven-year-old to wander the halls unsupervised; they called campus security, and campus security called his father. Dr. McKay declared that earth sciences fostered disordered thinking and mental petrifaction. Meredith decided he quite concurred.

On the other hand, although he was hesitant to come into the house while Jeanie roamed around inside it -- after the first day or two of bed rest, she had felt well enough to get up and move around, if sensitive enough to light that she pulled the shades down whenever the sun was out -- often enough the weather made being outside pleasant (if cool enough that Meredith was glad of warm wool). Moreover, the one pine tree behind the house not only had enough strong branches spaced evenly for good climbing, but had three in just the right spatial relationship to each other for a comfortable seat with a backrest and a foot support. Granted, it was more than a little difficult to climb up with a book in hand, but Meredith soon enough arranged a rope so that he could tie a bag of library-or-other books to its end and haul the bag up to his level.

A week after the quarantine began, he was in his tree-seat reading a book on nuclear fission when Jeanie called to him from the house. "Mer, I'm bored."

"What do you expect me to do about it?" he demanded, looking up. "You're going to get in trouble if Mom finds you on the roof."

Jeanie pulled the blanket from her bed more tightly around herself and leaned back against the second-story wall next to her open window. "I'm bored, and I feel like guh."

"With all the oatmeal you've been eating, I'm not surprised."

"Mer-e-dith! I have not been eating it! It's for my BATH!"

"Sure, sure, that's what they all say," her brother smugly pronounced, secure in the knowledge of oatmeal baths as one of the traditional treatments for full-body itching.

"It's not funny! I'm tired of itching..."

"Bet it sucks," he offered generously. He took hold of the stub of the lost-in-a-winter-storm branch before him and leaned forward, peering across the meters of empty air. "I think you've got some in your hair."

"Ew. Where?"

Meredith leaned back and pointed to his own head.

Jeanie felt. "I think that's a pock."

"Don't scratch it!" Meredith yelped. "You'll get germs in it and it'll scar."

"Where would the germs come from?" Jeanie asked irritably, although she did lower her hands. "I just had a bath."

"There are germs on your skin all the time, only they can't get in," he explained very superiorly. "Unless there's a hole in your skin or something."

"But I just washed!"

"In alcohol?"

"Oonnnnrghh!" Jeanie grunted, flapping her blanket at him.

"Hey, if that one's scabbed over," Meredith nobly ignored his sister's frustration, "are the others? I can't quite tell from here."

Jeanie scrutinized her arm. "I think so."

"Have Mom check -- if they all are, you're not contagious any more, and I can sleep in my own room again."

"The guest room smells much nicer," Jeanie argued, and Meredith snorted.

"Not when I'm camped in it, it doesn't."

 

Jeanie's pocks were in fact all crusted over, and so the next day she and Meredith were given the run of the house again, after its rooms had received the most thorough cleaning known to Canada, and then an impromptu airing out after Meredith had started a coughing fit. (He blamed the lemon-scented cleaning fluid. Their mother hoped aloud that Meredith wasn't getting any more hypersensitive than he was, as not putting something of notable mass in one's mouth was considerably easier to avoid than getting molecules wafted into one's nostrils. Meredith was depressingly sure that he was, which just figured.)

Coughing fit aside, he remained disgustingly healthy until they left for Montréal, eighteen days after they'd seen the first of Jeanie's pustules.

Three days into the vacation, the McKays gleefully pronounced him uninfected. Their hosts were less than thrilled that this was the first they had heard of any possible infectiousness on the part of their guests, and relations remained strained for the rest of that week.

Years later, when the varicella vaccine was first released for public consumption, Dr. McKay (no longer Meredith) made certain to be among the first to receive it. It had been bad enough anticipating a worse case than Jeanie's, but he knew too much about the standard adult prognosis.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the traditional method of dealing with infectious childhood diseases is practiced.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Did the staff HAVE to give the characters such similar-sounding names? Rgh.

Teyla was eleven Athosian years, which is nine annu, when Orin of Eluva came to foster with Emmagan.

(Many annu later, she would learn that an anns was very nearly the length of a year on both the world of the City of the Ancestors and the world from whence it came.)

He was sulky and terse, and he complained that the air of Athos hurt his eyes. By the second day, it had become too cold for him, except when it was too hot.

Her Aunt Kina took him by the shoulders to scold him, and then, worried, laid the back of her hand across his forehead.

"He is feverish," she told them, and so Orin lay down in the tent and Charin took Teyla to tickle fish in the stream. (Teyla kept getting impatient and reaching too soon and losing them; Charin told her again and again to be patient, that patience was the single thing most needed in hunting and cooking and trading.)

That night, Kina slept with Teyla and her father, and Orin slept in Kina's pallet by himself, to get over it. Charin and Torren talked in low voices, mildly concerned about something, as Teyla fell asleep.

The next morning, when Orin sat up, he had blue spots on his face and arm.

"Oh, joy," said Torren.

"Well, sooner or later it must have come upon them," Charin sighed. "We had best tell everyone else and put up the larger tent. Teyla, Toran, go and sit with Orin."

Teyla very hesitantly went and sat on the edge of Kina's pallet. Toran shrugged, flopped down next to her, and poked at a blue spot on the back of Orin's wrist. It was the color of cheese mold and looked sort of hard and rough, like a scab.

"Oww," Orin said. "That hurt." He elbowed Toran.

Toran elbowed him back.

"Children," Charin said sternly, and waited until they had quieted down before following her daughter out to talk to the rest of the encampment.

"What's with this big tent, anyway?" Orin asked some moments later.

"Everyone who has not had bluespot ought to get it now and get it over with," Toran's mother Ethra explained, "and the best way to do that is to have you all stay together, preferably in a tent large enough to contain you all."

"It is quarantine, then?" Teyla said. Last season Halling Irrylar had had the shaking-fever, and he and his parents had kept within their tent while the out-tent Irrylar and their obligands brought them food and, masked and gloved, bore their refuse away.

"It is," Ethra agreed. "In reverse, if possible."

"It will not be so very bad," Torren reassured them. "After the fever and the worst of the itching, you will have time to all play together if not the energy that would make it intolerable not to run outside. You should have done with it by the time Tagan returns."

And, indeed, it proved not to be so very bad, even when cooped up in a tent with Orin, although that might have been partly because of the Great Quarantined Pillow Fight -- it began on the very last day of possible infectibility, drew in all nineteen of the recovering cases of bluespot, and finished with Orin sitting on Halling while Teyla broke a pillow over the older boy's head.

After that they were friends.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the meaning of "inoculation" before it came to be used as a synonym for "vaccination" is demonstrated.

Ronon grew up in one of the market towns, not Ring City. It was a pleasant place to grow up, built on an easily defensible site -- defensible against other humans, not Wraith; Satedans were more familiar with the anarchy that too often followed in the wake of a culling than they would have liked, and generations later had yet to pull down their walls even when they had expanded beyond them -- much as the towndwellers and even some of the Cityfolk still kept their housecarts in readiness, parading them through the streets on their district's yearly festival even should they not be given to camping or travelling vacations, whether they lived in buildings the rest of the year or not. (Indeed, his mother insisted on keeping a team stabled down at the market, and only used the motor conversion her grandmother had installed to take the housecart down there and back up to the high town.) Ronon's house had a garden with a purpleflower tree and an unrepentant brake of sweet and juicy briarberries, and in the summers he and his mother and siblings would go out and pick them and make jams and cobblers and shortcakes.

The inoculators had come through when he was five and a half, but his mother had thought that he was really too little to suffer even a mild case and put her foot down when his father wanted to send him.

Then they didn't come through again for well over three long Satedan years; Ronon had lived through his thirteenth anns and his parents had made plans to send him to the city in order to get him properly inoculated before his ninth birthday by the time the inoculators returned. His parents willingly gave up those plans once they had the opportunity of having it taken care of in town: Ronon wasn't quite sure whether to be happy or sorry for it. On the one hand, he didn't quite like the idea of being sick in a strange place, and on the other -- he hadn't seen Ring City since the class trip right after his eighth birthday, and this time he would have gone alone, unlike the previous trip or his inoculation now, when his parents were sending the eldest of his younger sisters and brothers as well.

Still, what was done was done, and he packed his bag according to the list that his father had drawn up, feeling pleasantly superior to his sister and brother, who needed his father to pack for them. He ran down to the newsstand and bought three new pulps to sneak into his bag and take with him: a collection of stories of gunslingers and mounted cowherds from the Old North, the latest edition of Stunning Tales (featuring art of a handsome man in the tatters of army fatigues, brandishing both a pulse-gun and a long knife as he stood over the corpse of a woman with soldier's locks, and whose blurb promised the story of a taskmaster promoted to be taskmaster-general to the first legion to be assigned a male officer), and the first full-length adventure of the Shadow Snake, in which she would outwit and bring to justice jewel thieves, Wraith worshippers, and a ring of blackmailers.

On the day of the inoculation, they took the trolley down from the high town to the market, and hired one of the wagon-porters to pull Ronon and Colwyn and Orula's bags after them to the inoculation hospice, which was some walk out of the town's nominative borders and downstream from the market.

The hospice was a large stone building with many windows and bars on the lower halves of most of them; from the front, they could just see the inoculators' motor-housecart camped round the side under a roof on pillars, with no place even to attach a hart's harness to. By the door, neatly displayed behind glass, were the certificates of qualification in inoculation of a doctor, an intern, and two nurses. There were several other children there with their fathers, and a man and woman wearing the armbands of visiting nurses were trying to organize them into something resembling a line.

Ronon was the oldest of them, however. He was starting to wonder whether he was the oldest uninoculated person in the world when the outworld traders strolled round the bend in the path, irritation in their almond-shaped eyes and round faces.

"Didn't expect to see you here," Colwyn's friend Zaron's father commented.

Karajen, the leader of the traders, snorted. "Apparently, you won't let us return through the Ring until we've gone through this... ceremony, so we might as well get it over with now before we go back to the city and the Ring."

Ronon's father leveled a look at him. "Well, if we let you go back and you'd taken the full strength of the little pocks, you'd get home and fall sick and then most likely die in agony, taking your friends and family with you. We tend to frown on that kind of thing."

Karajen rolled his eyes, but subsided.

The youngest of the three traders huffed. "I've had the little pocks."

"Do you have proof of it?" the female nurse asked. "A record, or something?"

"Who writes such stuff down and carries it with them?"

"We do," Ronon hissed to Colwyn and Zaron. (Orula was hiding behind their father. Again.)

The third trader laughed. "So much for your pride that you came through it unscarred, Toraman!"

"I have a scar," Toraman admitted grudgingly, "on my left buttock."

"There's no way we can tell whether that's from the little pocks or a bad case of skin-eruption," the nurse said dryly. "Indulge our paranoia."

"What, we don't get to try?" the intern who'd come with the doctor called disappointedly.

The doctor hissed at her in a low voice.

"Orula," their father told them, "I never want to see you behaving like that."

Orula nodded, moisture in her eyes, and clutched her toy hart tighter, its leather antlers pressing into her skin.

After everyone had been given a number, the male nurse let them into the house itself and gave them painkiller pills with iced tea to take them with, and one by one they were called into the room that had been set up as an inoculation chamber. Some of the smaller children had their fathers come in with them -- Orula was one. Colwyn didn't, although he yelled like a stuck pig, enough to be heard through the heavy wooden door.

When Ronon's number was called, he marched in stoically, determined not to make a baby of himself. The doctor and her intern smiled at him, and he sat in the indicated chair, deciding to pay close attention to everything that went on so as not to make an idiot of himself when the part that hurt came around.

"If you would hold out your arm, please, Yeoman Dex," the doctor said with only a glance at her notes. Ronon complied, pleased to be addressed as an unmarried youth rather than a child. Obviously, despite the cool of the stone house, his father had been right when he'd advised Ronon to wear a vest rather than a tunic.

The female nurse scrubbed a patch of his upper arm with carbolic, and the male one handed the intern a scalpel from under a cloth.

"Would you like -- " the intern offered.

Ronon shook his head.

She took hold of his arm above the elbow with her left hand and neatly sliced into the arm between its two big muscles with her right.

Ronon might, possibly, have made a noise that someone else might have mistaken for a whimper, but he did not cry out; not then, and not when the intern dropped her scalpel into a low pan of clear liquid and then used her free hand to hold the cut open.

The doctor smiled at him, removed a corked glass tube from the rack to her left, worked the cork out, accepted a pair of tweezers from the male nurse, and very carefully picked the infected thread out of the tube.

Ronon held his breath as she carefully, carefully laid it within his cut, and he rather thought everyone else did too.

Once that was done, the medical personnel burst into a flurry of motion; the doctor dropped her tweezers into the pan of liquid, which the female nurse bore away; the intern pinched his wound shut and blotted up the blood with a flax pad, which she then dropped into a waste bag held open by the male nurse; and the nurses came back with flaxen thread and a curved needle, respectively.

The doctor washed her hands in carbolic and sewed Ronon's wound closed with two stitches. The intern began to bandage it.

"No iodine?" Ronon asked, puzzled. Whenever he had cut or scraped himself deeply, his parents had painted the wounds with iodine.

"We don't want to kill off the little pocks before it can infect you," the doctor explained. She had a kindly smile, and Ronon wondered whether she had grandchildren.

When the bandage was neatly on, the nurses dismissed him, and Ronon's father helped him and Colwyn and Orula unpack in the rooms that would be theirs until the little pocks had run its course. Orula was upset that she had to stay in the girls' room, but Madam Rell's eleven-annu-old daughter offered to look after her. Arima Rell's hair was bright red-gold and her round face was as lightly freckled as the traditional Satedan standard of beauty might wish, and Ronon had never been more conscious of his outRing chin than at that moment.

Then all the parents except five-year-old Naymie's father went home and left their children to their newfound quarantine.

The first day was irritating -- fortunately, a thunderstorm blew up in the afternoon, making nearly everyone reconciled to spending it inside. Arima Rell organized a game of herb basket, and Ronon, silently disdaining such a childish pastime, joined in (after all, he only had three pulps and one Improving Book, given him by a well-meaning uncle.)

Over the next dozenight, the confinement went from merely irritating to outright infuriating. The medical personnel, assisted by Naymie's father and three live-in servants hired in the town for the inoculation period, had the thankless task of trying to keep twenty-three children and three outworlders fed, clothed, in clean linens, and in order, and one or the other tended to break down on any given day. Two of the children's inoculation sites got double-infected and had to be drained of pus. Even reading at the slowest rate possible, Ronon finished his Northern and got well into Stunning Tales.

Then he woke up aching all over. He tried to finish the story about the taskmaster-general (as well as a man officer, the legion had two enlisted women and other elements of topsy-turviness), but the letters on the page made him queasy, and after sitting very quietly for some time he wound up helplessly retching into the water-closet.

"Well, it's to be expected," said the male nurse, and helped him back into bed.

Toraman proved to be the only one not running a temperature, and was pressed into service, walking up and down the long room bringing ice and replacing slop pans; apparently he had been telling the truth about having had the little pocks. Naymie's father might have been helping out too, but he would be in Naymie's room if so and therefore made no impression on the boys.

Even before the fevers and aching stopped, he started getting pimples. Hundreds of pimples, thousands of pimples, millions of pimples. And they were all over. They were on his face. They were on his arms. They were on his scalp. They were on his palms. Ronon was sure that one of these days, he would discover one under his tongue. And they hurt, and they itched -- not simple itching, but a sort of itching on the underside of his skin -- and they weren't even normal pimples, but nasty little hard things that hurt to press. It was as if someone had whisked him out of his skin, shaken millet into him, and pulled it back on while he slept, which he had been doing a lot.

Eventually, far too slowly, the nasty swellings dried up and crusted into pocks. Only some of Ronon's had, though, by the time he decided to save the Shadow Snake for last and start in on his uncle's Improving Book.

The book proved to be as Improving as one could reasonably expect. Its hero, Kelland, was a poor but honest city boy whose father died in the opening pages, leaving Kelland to act as the second parent to his rambunctious brothers and sisters and get a succession of jobs to help his mother out. At least the adventures of the children were relatively entertaining. Then Kelland favorably impressed an old doctor from one of the valley towns, who hired him to become a companion to her wild grandson.

Naturally, the grandson, Tamman, proved to be, although friendly enough to Kelland, game for any rig and with a positive genius for succumbing to the blandishments of wastrel women, spending their substance and his as well in riotous living. The riotous living and dens of iniquity that Tamman dragged Kelland through were summarized briefly, rather than described in the fascinating detail a pulp would have used. Instead, space was given to Kelland's romantic entanglements as he grew older: two young gentlewomen, bitter rivals, vied for his favor and his hand, while the humble apple seller quietly adored him from not-that-afar -- Ronon guessed he was supposed to sympathize with the last, but she was insanely boring. He hoped Kelland would get together with the rivals, who would then slowly overcome their hatred in a greater cause and choose to cleave together in the end.

Meanwhile, Tamman took to drink, and to shaba-nut, and to gambling, and then to the most terrible habit of all, a habit that sapped his strength, and hollowed his eyes, and thinned the hair of his head, and thickened the hair of his seat, and caused him to lisp, and see double, and that so horrified the Improving Book that it refused to say what in the worlds the habit was.

Ronon puzzled over it for a few hours before waving over the next attendant, who happened to be the doctor, in order to ask her.

The doctor took one look at the page he indicated and flushed, her lips thinning.

"That book is wrong," she told him after she visibly brought herself under control. "Back in the day they used to believe that that would happen, but now we know that it is natural and necessary for men not living with wives."

"Yes," Ronon said thoughtfully, "but what is?"

Staring out over his left shoulder, she told him.

Ronon's mother and father had raised him to mind his manners, and he really did try not to burst out laughing. He didn't quite succeed, but he did try.

After he had laughed himself out, he asked the doctor whether she would mind please writing a letter to his uncle, letting him know that it was in fact natural and necessary to jerk off. Ancestors willing, perhaps this would be the way to improve his uncle's disposition.

The book turned out not to be a total loss (even though Kelland did marry the apple seller and her aunt after Tamman poisoned himself with sleeping-draught); now that people were starting to wobble around and talk to each other, Karajen offered to "buy" the book -- he could use a laugh -- in return for an offworld pulp on shiny paper that was. according to Karajen, a dashing tale of slavery and sea pirates, complete with several thrillingly bloodcurdling illustrations. It was all in Ringspeech, so it would take Ronon plenty of time to read it, and he would probably be home by the time he really, really wanted a dictionary.

His pocks dried out and one by one flaked off, leaving smooth or slightly dry skin behind in almost all cases. Except for two of the ones on his chin -- ones that he had poked, although not as often as some others -- that left little dents behind when they came off.

"I scarred," Ronon said, looking in the mirror.

"You did," Colwyn agreed.

"It's not that bad," the male nurse told him. "No one will be able to tell it's not from skin eruptions."

Which didn't help.

"Oh, that's lucky," said Karajen when he saw them. "A good beard will cover those right up." He stroked his own (wispy, draggly, and looking fit for the rag-bag) beard thoughtfully.

Ronon wasn't sure whether he wanted to grow a beard, but he thanked the trader politely and buried himself back in the derring-do of the Shadow Snake, who thought nothing of swinging from building to building on a grappling-rope and always carried at least one gun and her twin knives, Ari and Quelle. It even proved enough to help distract him from the ruckus when Zaron and Colwyn organized a game of indoor tag.

And then the last of the pocks fell off the last of the inoculees and they packed up, setting their bags out and receiving numbers again -- this time, the traders went first, as they were only getting their certificates of inoculation. Ronon wound up nearly at the end of the line.

When it was Ronon's turn, the intern handed him his certificate first thing, and then he took off his shirt so that one of the nurses could wash him with carbolic before the doctor carefully selected her needles and touched up his blood type -- it had faded and distorted a little as he'd grown -- before carefully adding the tiny sigil of a successful little pocks inoculation.

He put his shirt back on and went out the front door, where his father was waiting with Colwyn and Orula and all their bags and a wagon-porter. The three of them proudly showed off their new tattooes to their father and the porter and each other, and then they set off for the walk home.


End file.
